Entertainment

Cyberattacks Target Russian Broadcasters, Ustream CEO Responds

Popular online video broadcasting and streaming service Ustream has gone down only three times in its five-year history, but on Wednesday it was hit with the most complex Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack it's ever seen.

The hit was targeted at streams from Russian citizen journalists broadcasting live footage of protests against the recently re-inaugurated president Vladimir Putin. Each of UStream's previous service interruptions have coincided with protests in Moscow and other Russian cities.

Ustream experienced seven different types of cyberattacks, which were "highly adaptative and very actively managed throughout the day," Brad Hunstable, Ustream's CEO and co-founder, told Mashable.

Russian journalists and citizen journalists, such as "Ridus" and "Reggamortis1," have flocked to Ustream as a way to broadcast live footage from protests throughout Russia and to the rest of the world. They use smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices to transmit footage. (Ustream has also become the platform of choice for citizen journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement).

These Russian broadcasters have seen a peak of half a million viewers during a two-hour span, with an average viewing time of 30 minutes each — within Russia alone.

"If you think about that, that's almost the size of a cable channel, and maybe bigger than any one cable channel in Russia," Hunstable said.

Ustream — which Hunstable said "essentially never gets brought down" — was offline for 10 hours on Wednesday as a result of the latest cyberattack. He said that this week's attack was the tipping point.

Once the site was back up and running yesterday evening, the UStream team immediately put up a Russian version of the site to serve as a direct challenge to whomever is targeting the Russian journalists using the platform. (Hunstable didn't suggest who might be carrying out the attacks, but did say they're coming from inside Russia, Kazakhstan and Iran).

"We didn't say anything first two times, but now we're acting out of a show of solidarity [with the Russian broadcasters]," he added.

Hunstable considers each assault an affront to the free flow of information on the Internet.

"This is an attack on the freedom of the Internet," Hunstable said. "Ustream is an amazing platform on which we want people to use to share stories and information. To deny that is something that we take very seriously. We may not always agree with what our users say, but we believe they have a right to speak, share, connect — it's a fundamental part of human dignity."

Hunstable, who spoke to Mashable from Budapest, Hungary, is expecting another wave of cyberattacks on Thursday. His team spent the night preparing, not unlike a coastal community readying for an approaching hurricane.

"We've got guys working overnight to prepare," Hunstable said. "We're a big business with a big vision: bring live broadcast capability to to masses, democratize broadcasting. With our site, users can and have amassed millions of viewers. The world is changing, and Ustream is a part of that change."

Mashable
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